Why Can't I Get Laid?

One Man's Journey Through A Yearlong Dry Spell

I haven’t had sex in a year. OK, it’s actually been seven months, three weeks, four days, two hours, and 25 minutes, but who’s counting? Not me, obviously. It feels like a year, so that’s what matters. And let's face it, saying "a year" carries way more dramatic weight, which is useful for the purpose of this piece, so let’s just go with it, shall we? But before you snicker, point, pity, whip doughnuts or do whatever it is you lotharios do to people like me, let me explain.

I like to consider myself a sociable guy. Yes, I spend most of my waking hours glued to a screen, either surfing the web, watching Game of Thrones or living vicariously through your Instagram uploads, but when the sun goes down and the pints get poured, I'm usually there, collar popped, hair slicked, "making the scene," as they say. In fact, even though I'm now 30 years old, I haven't really curbed my partying tendencies since college, the reason being that in college, going out was almost always directly correlated to getting laid, and guess what? I still enjoy getting laid, although you wouldn't know it by my recent track record.

Back then, getting laid was simple arithmetic: Go to a bar, meet a girl, make the girl laugh a few times, wake up next to her in the morning. Ah, the good ol' days. Today, picking up women feels more like calculus, and waking up next to a warm body has been replaced by waking up next to my glowing laptop, usually at the tail-end of whatever Howard Stern YouTube clip I uploaded to help usher me to sleep the night before.

I last had intercourse in December, with a blonde woman I went out with just a few times. Much like our relationship, the sex was brief, and about as memorable as a Will Smith movie.

After one month of involuntary abstinence, I thought, "Man, oh man, do I love having the bed to myself! I get to stretch out my legs and everything!" After three months, I started to seriously miss the female touch, and a felt a growing sense of panic gnawing at the back of my skull. Five months in, the term "rut" became part of my everyday vocabulary, as in, "How are you?" "Good, but I'm kind of in a rut."

But today, after seven months and change, I can confidently call my ongoing predicament a full-blown dry spell, a crisis of the loins, the kind you read about in case studies on celibacy and think, "Boy, am I glad I'm not that guy!" It's almost gotten to the point where I kind of, sort of, forget what it's like to have sex, how to get it and, perhaps most troublesome of all, how to do it.

First of all, let's establish that if you're a guy, getting laid is not easy. Most women can walk into a bar, zero in on their prey and have him begging for it within minutes. I've seen it happen. But unless you have breasts or your name starts with Channing and ends with Tatum, getting laid requires major effort on your part. Women want to be charmed, they want to be flattered, and they want you to pay for stuff. It’s not necessarily fair, but one of the first lessons our daddies teach us is that life isn’t fair, so suck it up, fellas. I have. In fact, I’ve realized that instead of whining about not getting laid, it’s far more constructive to examine why I’m not getting laid, and to remedy it.